Likewise, Adams and Chesley are convincing as preteens: Adams the “worldly” Frieda who explains menstruation to the mystified and terrified Pecola Chesley the feisty Claudia who wants to tear her white doll apart in an attempt to find out why pink skin and blue eyes are thought so beautiful.Ĭoleman-Reed’s Mrs. Monya’s Pecola is charming, innocent and hopeful, and Monya even made me buy her as 11 years old. Sonnenberg directs this tricky production (with its part-narration, part-play structure) with a sure hand, and has a top-notch cast to make the script into a riveting evening of theater. Of course, the larger point of the whole play is the why of racism and the damage it does, and there’s nothing better to express it than Morrison’s singing prose, much of which Diamond has wisely put into the script intact. One day, when it’s clear her prayers won’t be answered and her existence gets to be too much, Pecola visits local psychic reader/spiritual adviser/pedophile Soaphead Church (Abner Genece) to plead for blue eyes.ĭiamond splits the narration of this story, but most of the heavy lifting is done by nine-year-old Claudia, who tells us in the beginning that Pecola is pregnant by her father and that she wants to relate not the why (which she doesn’t understand) but the how of it.
THE BLUEST EYE PLAY MAC
Observing the voluble but obviously loving Mac Teer family (headed by Kimberly King as the stern but kind Mama) only serves to emphasize what Pecola lacks in her own family. Pecola is lucky to find two friends in vivacious Claudia (Lorene Chesley) and old-beyond-her-years Frieda Mac Teer (Marshel Adams), and when Cholly (in a drunken stupor) burns down their living quarters, Pecola moves in with the Mac Teers. He has his own sad history, and visits his own problems on his daughter one night when he comes home drunk to rape and impregnate her. Pecola’s father Cholly (Warner Miller), a physically abusive alcoholic unable to support his family, seems to spend his time in or on the way to the local bar. Thwarted dreams have led her to invest her emotional energy in her job as maid in a white household. Breedlove”) has a permanent limp and a self-image to match though seldom violent, she (Melissa Coleman-Reed) is emotionally abusive. Pecola’s mother Pauline (whom she calls “Mrs.
MOXIE Theatre and Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company offer a stunning co-production of Lydia Diamond’s fine adaptation of Toni Morrison’s first novel through March 3 in MOXIE’s space. “The Bluest Eye” is the story of one year in Pecola’s difficult life. When a new, much lighter girl named Maureen Peel (Chelsea Diggs-Smith) shows up in school, Pecola has someone else to envy. She loves Shirley Temple, especially when she dances with Bojangles, because “she’s pretty and talented and people love her.” Very much aware that people refer to her whole family as “ugly,” she surmises that if she just had blue eyes, her life would be fine. Pecola longs to be loved, and reads the “Dick and Jane” books, wondering why her black family can’t be like that white one. Pecola lives in Ohio in 1941, surrounded by people who don’t prize her looks, her brains or anything else about her. Her skin is dark brown and she is ignored, mocked, even hated. In other words, it was successful in showing what discrimination feels like.Įleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove (Cashae Monya) doesn’t need a game to tell her what not belonging feels like. When the “subjects” realized the rules of the experiment, unrest flared into open revolt. Attendees (who were not informed of the game beforehand) were treated differently depending on their eye color: those with brown eyes got better food, housing, service and setups for their presentations than those with blue eyes. In the late ’60s, a game called Blue Eyes Brown was devised for a conference on racism.
0 kommentar(er)
